Thursday, October 08, 2009

Accordions were popular when I was young. I remember an early evening scene from about 1950 near the tennis courts of our village's municipal park. The event was a local talent show in which a couple of girls roughly junior high or high school age showed off their ability on the instrument. From the vantage point of my eight-year-old self, the instruments looked half their size and much too heavy for them. I think they played a couple of popular tunes of the time.

Like my friends I grew to see the instrument as the ultimate of un-cool. And in this, as with so very much that was thoughtlessly dismissive in my young life, I eventually managed to reevaluate my early prejudice and no longer recoil from, actually welcome, the presence of an accordion in, say, the band playing at a wedding reception.

All this came to mind this morning when I came across a link to a Youtube video of a young man playing the "Presto" section of "Summer" from Vivaldi's Four Seasons.

I'm not giving that link since it was accompanied by an annoying commercial promotion. Instead, a bit of searching turned up this plain version, marred only by the bizarre title given it by the uploader:

{Presto section of Summer from The Four Seasons. The young man is apparently a Romanian named Aleksandr Hrustevič (Александр Хрустевич).}

Youtube turns out to have quite a few versions of this piece on that instrument. I don't suppose it will surprise that they're almost all from central and eastern Europe. Here is a smattering of the many:

{Same, played by Ventsi Kolev in Plovdiv, Bulgaria.}

Quite a few are mobile-phone videos of street performers, such as:

{Solo performance by a street player in Rosental, Muenchen, Germany.}

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEy9EwiBCmw

{Same, by three guys in a subway station in Sofia, Bulgaria.}

{Same, by an accordion quartet; performers and location not identified.}